Cardiology

This is an updated guideline on heart failure from NICE published in September 2018. Most of this is what we are currently doing. They have pulled several different guidelines together to make this mo...

There are two new guidelines from NICE on the use of Evolocumab and Alirocumab for treating primary hypercholesterolaemia (both familial and non-familial) and mixed dyslipidaemia. What are these drugs...

This is a new guideline from NICE on when sacubitril valsartan should be used. Sacubitril valsartan is a combination drug. It includes the angiotensin 2 receptor blocker (ARB), valsartan. It also incl...

These are two guidelines, but both on the topic of pre-operative testing, so they fit nicely together. I am just pulling out the points useful for us GPs. Pre-operative tests This is a new guideline f...

This is a new guideline from NICE which advises that Edoxaban can be used for preventing stroke and VTE in patients with non-valvular AF who have one or more other risk factors such as:Heart failure...

This is a new guideline from Nice on apixaban. It has now been approved for the treatment of and secondary prevention of DVT and VTE. Now dabigatran, rivaroxaban and apixaban can all be used in AF, fo...

This new guideline from Nice states that rivaroxaban can now be used after ACS with elevated cardiac enzymes. It should be used either with aspirin, or with aspirin and clopidogrel together.It decre...

This is a new guideline from NICE on Acute Heart Failure. This is really aimed at secondary care and does not add anything to what we would routinely do in general practice. One thing to remember is t...

This new guidance from NICE advises that 2 new devices have been approved for home monitoring in warfarin patients with AF or heart valve problems. They are surprisingly cost-efficient for self-monito...

This is a summary of the somewhat controversial updated guideline from NICE on lipids. You could probably only have failed to notice the uproar surrounding this is you'd been living on Mars for the la...

This is the updated guideline from NICE on atrial fibrillation. This guideline is very different overall to the last guideline, but it probably doesn't contain anything radical if you've been to any A...

This guideline from Nice, updates the advice regarding the secondary prevention of MI. Much of the guidance is the same. The biggest change is regarding the use of antithrombotics. I have summarised s...

This guideline from SIGN has been updated. There are a couple of interesting points in it that I was not aware of:Patients should be advised to take GTN at the start of angina pain, then up to 3 tim...

This guidance is another new drug for the use in AF as an anticoagulant. It is a Factor Xa inhibitor and is more effective than warfarin. It hasn’t been shown to be more effective than Rivaroxaban and...

This guideline advises that the WatchBP Home A Device is cost-effective. It is a blood pressure machine that can detect an irregular pulse. It is fairly sensitive and specific for AF. Any positive res...

This guidance is about using ivabradine in heart failure. It will only be started by specialist nurses, cardiologists, or GPSIs, but we will be responsible for continuing it, so it is worth knowing wh...

This guideline is for Rivaroxaban, which is a Factor Xa inhibitor and has been approved for use in patients with nonvalvular AF and at least one of the following risk factors (which equates to a CHADS...

This guideline lays out the criteria for the use of Dabigatran, a thrombin inhibitor. It can be considered as an alternative to warfarin in non-valvular AF if at least one of the following applies:P...

Ticagrelor is a PO drug which inhibits platelet aggregation. In combination with aspirin it is more effective than clopidogrel + aspirin at reducing the endpoint of MI or death from vascular events. I...

This is a must read guideline! The main changes are: using Ambulatory Blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) to diagnose hypertension, using different cut off levels for treatment in the over 80s, using cal...

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